You must have seen pictures of Conor McGregor weight cut, read the story of Khabib Nurmagomedov life threatening weight cut or seen the video of cyborg weight cut struggles.
These were are professional athletes who went to extreme measures to cut weight and put their life at risk while doing so.
You have to take the right lesson from them and not do what they did.
You have to keep the weight in a close range with the weight class you belong to, so you don’t have to take any risks.
We here to give you a day-to-day breakdown of what you need to do to cut weight in a healthy way.
Factors Involved in Weight Cutting
There are a number of factors will affect how much weight you can lose in the given time;
Gender – men can cut more weight than women in a shorter amount of time…Mother Nature is cruel.
Amount of body fat – the less you have the more weight you can cut. Fat has less water than muscles and during weight cutting you will lose a lot of water weight.
Genetic makeup – some fighters have genetics that can help them lose more weight.
Healthy Plan to Cut Weight: Day 1-6
The first 6 days, your focus should be on cutting your bad carbohydrate intake. The overall carb intake should be 50% of what it usually is.
Avoid foods like pasta, rice, bread, etc.
Avoid sugar altogether.
You will still need to include good carbs in your diet. Eat foods that are whole-wheat.
Lowering the amount of carbs you eat will aid you in losing weight faster. Along with the water weight, you will also be burning some fat in your body.
A zero carb diet is not ideal because you will need energy during your training sessions and carbs will provide you with that energy.
Without it, you will struggle in your training and your endurance level will suffer.
Start with the new diet from day 1 and on day 2 you need to…
Day 2
You have to lower your sodium intake. Large amounts of sodium in your body makes it retain weight.
Reduce the amount of salt you eat in your food. Don’t go cold turkey as that might confuse the body.
You have gradually reduce the amount of salt from day 2 till the last day before the fight.
Next thing you need to do is up the amount of water you drink.
The water will take the sodium out of the body, basically flushing your insides.
You may think, why drink lots of water when you are trying to lose water weight?
Because it is flushing the sodium out of your system and when it is out, you will not retain the water weight like you usually do.
So all the water you drink will soon pass out of your system in a normal way.
Day 6 & 7
In the last two days, you have to decrease the amount of water you are drinking.
The exact amount will depend on whether you fight on the day of weigh in or the day after the weigh in.
If you fight the day after your weigh in, then you can stop drinking water in the last 24 hours before the weigh in. Because you will have time to recover from that.
In the other situation, you will have to cut the water intake but you can’t bring it to zero because you have to fight the same day and you will not have time to recover.
As far as diet is concerned, you should eat only a few carbs and a very small amount of fat.
The reason being that your body’s glycogen levels cannot be zero 1 day before the fight. You will not be able to recover them before the fight.
So don’t starve yourself.
Day 7
This is the day before the fight, most likely the weigh in day so you need to sweat out the remaining water weight.
Unless you have already gotten to your ideal weight, in which case congrats to you.
In case you haven’t you should not drink any water and use a sauna suit to get the maximum amount of water out of your system.
Do eat some carbs to keep yourself going throughout the day.
Note: Check your weight regularly during these 7 days to stay on top of the weight loss.
The plan mentioned above should help you to lose 10 to 20 pounds of weight in 7 days but that doesn’t mean that you should only use it the last 7 days.
The more time you have, the more easily you can cut weight.
The biggest advantage you will have is that you will have all your energy and stamina come fight day.
Our next article will detail how to properly recover from the type of weight loss mentioned above, so be sure to check back.
